Why Does Daddy Have To Go?
by LaneWinree51
Summary: The military life is incredibly taxing, but perhaps no one suffers more than the children of the men and women of the New Republic armed forces. For Syal Antilles, it all boils down to one simple question: Why does daddy have to go?


**Title:** Why Does Daddy Have to Go?  
**Rating:** G  
**Characters:** The Antilles family (specifically Syal), cameos by Tycho and Face Loran  
**Timeline:** Roughly 20-39 ABY  
**Disclaimer:** Don't own the characters or the fandom. That belongs to Lucas and so forth.  
**Description:** The military life is incredibly taxing, but perhaps no one suffers more than the children of the men and women of the New Republic armed forces. For Syal Antilles, it all boils down to one simple question: why does daddy have to go?

~*~

* * *

"Why does daddy have to go?"

It was a question that Syal Antilles was forced to pose to her parents all too often. Every time she would ask, her mother would put on a smile and lift young Syal into her arms. At the time, she found her mother's smile to be reassuring, a gentle message that nothing was amiss and everything would be alright. It would be several more years before she realized what that smile was really there for: to shield Syal from the harsh reality of her father's line of work.

"Daddy's going to be away at work for a few weeks, love," her mother would say as she fought back tears. "He has a very important job, you know."

Syal would pout at this point. Daddy always seemed to be leaving just before something important was supposed to happen. He was supposed to take Syal and her younger sister Myri to the Coronet City Zoo tomorrow, and this was something that Syal had been looking forward to this trip forever (even though she had only known about it for a standard week). As she looked out the window and watched her father's landspeeder cruising away from their little apartment Syal could feel her frustration mounting. Daddy never wanted to spend time with her.

"It's not fair!" Syal often protested. "He just likes Uncle Wes and Uncle Hobbie more than me."

Syal's mother would cast an admonishing look to her as she suddenly switched from trying to hold back tears to holding back laughter, "Trust me, Syal. Daddy would much rather spend time with you than with Uncle Wes and Uncle Hobbie."

"Then why does he always have to go?" Syal couldn't hide her disappointment.

Her mother's answer was always the same, "Daddy has to go to work because he loves us very much." She would place a kiss on Syal's forehead as she strengthened the hold on her daughter, "He loves me, he loves your sister, and he loves you more than anyone else in the world. It's daddy's job to make sure that the people he loves are safe from all of the bad people in the Galaxy."

"Daddy flies his X-Wing to keep us safe?"

"That's right, Syal," her mother would say as she set Syal back on the floor. "Now go play with your sister, mommy needs to make a few comm calls."

As Syal grew older, she became more and more aware of the dangers of her father's profession. By the time she was eight she had learned to dread the sound of her father stumbling through their home on Coruscant in the middle of the night. His heavy footsteps in the hallway didn't always mean he was leaving on some urgent assignment from Starfighter Command. More often than not he was simply scrambling to his work terminal to answer an urgent message int he middle of the night. Still, those footsteps always caused a knot to form in the pit of her stomach. He might be getting ready to leave for work. What danger could her father be rushing into this time? Would he be coming back in one piece?

Whenever Syal's father left the house in the middle of the night, she knew she could count on one thing. From the bunk below her, she could make out the sounds of her younger sister crying. Perhaps this caused Syal more distress than her father actually leaving on assignment. It broke her heart to see her sister so upset. Sure, their father would come into their room and tell them that he was leaving for a while, that he would be back soon and he'd be sure to make up for his absence. Their father didn't have the time to quell Myri's tears because a landspeeder was usually waiting outside for him. That was Syal's responsibility.

"Why does daddy have to go?" Myri would ask through tears.

Syal would climb down from her bunk and kneel down next to her younger sister, "Daddy has an important job, sis. He makes sure that the Galaxy is a safe place for the people he loves the most: you, me, and mom."

"But I just want him to be here with us!" at this point Syal could tell that Myri was ready to sob.

Myri put on her best smile to hide her own fear and uncertain feelings. She nodded her understanding as she wiped the tears away from her younger sister's eyes, "I do too, Myri, but you have to remember that daddy's only going away to work because that's what's best for all of us. Daddy makes sure that bad people can't hurt us."

Syal knew this was a gross oversimplification of her father's job, but a part of her also recognized that ultimately that's why their father flew a dangerous piece of war machinery for the military. There were a lot of bad people in the Galaxy, and her father was doing his part to make sure those bad people couldn't hurt anyone, especially their family, "Daddy will be back soon, Myri."

"Promise?" Myri would ask, sniffling as she finally got her tears under control.

"Promise."

Though she may have been able to put up a confident façade in front of her sister, Syal had a difficult time believing in her own words. This was especially difficult when she was alone at school. Growing up as part of a military family, she had gone to several different schools to this point in her life. Though the scenery may have changed, some things stayed all too familiar. Her classrooms were filled with children who belonged to military families like herself. Like her father, many of her fellow classmates had parents who had been called away in the middle of the night.

School brought another instinctive fear for Syal. The worst thing that could possibly happen was the school's headmaster or headmistress walking into a classroom in the middle of a lesson and having them summon one child into the hallway. Whenver this happened, Syal knew that there was little chance that the message the headmaster or headmistress had to share was good news. It was almost always devastating.

The first time Syal had seen this happen had been a jarring moment that would end up sticking with her for the rest of her life. One unassuming day during Basic the headmaster had walked into the classroom and quietly summoned Syal's best friend into the hallway. From where she was sitting, Syal could see out into the hall via the door window. She made out the figures of the headmaster, her friend's mother, and someone dressed in a uniform similar to the one her father wore at formal events.

Out of nowhere Syal saw her friend burst into tears. Her wails of agony could be heard through the classroom door, causing her teacher to cast a nervous glance at the headmaster in the hallway. Moments later, her friend and her mother were ushered away. Syal wouldn't see her friend again for another week. When she finally came back to school, Syal happily bounded up to her on the playground.

"Where have you been?" Syal asked.

"Away," her friend replied simply, staring at a pebble on the ground as if it were the most fascinating thing on all of Coruscant.

Syal could sense that something was wrong, "Did something happen?"

"My daddy died," her friend said quietly. "Mom says he got shot down in his X-Wing."

Syal did everything she could to try and comfort her best friend. Syal even offered her the stuffed pink Gizka in her room that her friend admired so much. Nothing Syal could do seemed to lift the spirits of her schoolmate, "Why did daddy have to go away?"

"Your dad had an important job like my dad," Syal said confidently. "He wanted to make the Galaxy safe for the people he loved the most."

At the tender age of eight Syal knew without a shadow of a doubt that's why her father and her best friend's father had gone away to war. In Syal's mind, that was one truth she was convinced couldn't be shaken. She held on to that belief until she was ten years old, when the Vong suddenly made her question everything. They had arrived in the Galaxy and had killed so many people and, once again, given the military another reason to take her father away from her. This time they had taken him away when her family needed him the most.

Syal, Myri, and their mother had barely escaped Coruscant as It fell to the Vong. People had been dying all around them, but no one had arrived in time to stop the Vong. When rescue had arrived to pull Syal and her family off of Coruscant and to safety, she had hoped to see her father among the people leading them away from danger. Instead, she recognized only a few of their rescuers as being friends of her father.

Syal Antilles' father was nowhere to be seen.

"He didn't come back for us," Syal said bitterly.

Syal's mother reached over from her seat on the shuttle and wrapped an arm around her daughter, "Your father has a lot on his plate right now, but he made sure to send his best people to come get us."

"You told me daddy loved us!" Syal protested. "You said he left home so he could protect us!"

Her mother was taken aback by Syal's sudden outburst, "He does love us. That's what he's doing, Syal."

The bald man in the co-pilot's seat of the shuttle had apparently heard Syal. He undid his seat restraints and walked into the passenger bay, taking a knee in front of her, "You know, in the heat of that daring escape I forgot to give you a message Wedge- Sorry, your dad told me to give you."

By this point Syal wasn't in much of a talking mood. The man continued to speak anyways, "He says he's sorry he couldn't be here, but the Wraiths wouldn't let him come back to Coruscant… Syal, if it was up to your dad he would have hijacked the first shuttle he could get his hands on and come back to get you himself. He wasn't allowed to leave the base, but he wanted to make sure the three of you got off of Coruscant safely. That's why he sent us. We're very good at these kinds of things."

"And blowing things up!" the pilot called from the cockpit.

The bald man had done little to alleviate Syal's anger towards her father. On Borleias (where the New Republic had set up a military base) she treated her father coldly. She was furious that he hadn't come back to get them. Over the years she had developed a heroic image of her father, a man who laughed in the face of danger. A man who was infallible in every way, shape, and form. The image of her father in her mind's eye was that of a man who would rush back home to save them from danger, regardless of the situation. He hadn't come back for them. He had stayed on Borleias and sent others to do his job.

Why did daddy have to go to Borleias? To Syal it was beginning to feel like he left in order to get away from his family.

Not long after arriving at the New Republic base, they were forced to evacuate again. The Vong were bearing down on the planet. As Syal and her sister and mother boarded a shuttle to head to one of the safer star cruisers, she bitterly noted that her father was staying behind again. He wasn't on board the shuttle. No doubt he had found something more important to do than tend to his family. He would probably show up on the cruiser hours or days later, sheepishly smiling and offering to buy her and her sister some sort of trinket as a mea culpa.

It wasn't long before she realized that something was amiss. In their temporary quarters, Syal's mother was frantically making comm calls behind closed doors. Syal pressed her ear against the door, trying to make out some sort of conversation.

"This is Iella Antilles…I know you're busy with triage but I've already checked in with the lead deck officer and the roster manager…My husband hasn't checked in and it's four hours past the designated rendezvous window…He's not there?...Can you send out a call to the other capitol ships?...Yes, I understand…Thank you."

Syal slowly backed away from the door. Even though she was only ten, she could sense that something bad was happening. She sat down on a nearby chair, pulling her knees up to her chest. Where was her father? Had something happened back on Borleias? Suddenly, memories of that day at school two years earlier came flooding back to her. Had her father suffered the same fate of her best friend's father? Had Syal's father been shot down?

Was her father dead?

She wasn't sure how long she had been crying for when the doorchime rang. Her mother burst out of her room to answer the door. At the other side with black hair and a dark beard, dressed in the same orange flightsuit that Syal's father often wore. Syal watched as the man and her mother whispered quietly to each other. Moments later, her mother burst into tears. That wasn't right. Her mother never cried, she was the strongest person in the Galaxy. That must mean that she had gotten bad news Syal's father.

Her mother quickly gathered her sister and took Syal by the hand. She was too afraid to ask where they were going, for she was expecting the worst. For what seemed like an eternity her mother led Syal and her sister through the endless maze of the star cruiser's corridor. Eventually, she led them into what Syal recognized as the hangar where their shuttle had landed hours earlier. In the center of the large, open facility was a heavily damaged X-Wing. Flight technicians rushed towards it, placing a ladder against the hull and climbing up. One technician had brought a tool along with him and immediately, he began to cut into the hull of the battered starfighter to release the canopy. Minutes later, they extracted a man and helped him to the ground.

It was Syal's father.

She didn't realize that her mother had tried to hold her back when she broke into a run towards the crippled X-Wing. Without thinking, she threw her arms around her father and buried her face in his stomach. "Why didn't you come on the shuttle with us?" Syal asked through choked sobs.

Her father looked down at her, compassion and sadness in his eyes. He knelt down and placed his hands on his daughter's shoulders, "Oh Syal, I'm so sorry I had you worried."

"Why weren't you on the shuttle?" Syal repeated.

"I had to go back to get an X-Wing so I could protect you," her father said. "The Vong were coming after us in a hurry. I needed to make sure you, your sister, your mother, and everyone else on this ship got away safely."

"But why couldn't you just stay with us?"

"Syal," her father began, "even if I have to go away for a little while, I will always come back to you because I love my family with all my heart."

It would be a number of years before she would fully understand her father's motivation to serve such a dangerous, life-threatening calling. Now as a young adult she stood atop a stage before an audience of her family, friends, and peers. Standing before her was her father's old friend and one of her greatest mentors. In his hand he held a small, velvet-covered black box. As he opened it, he revealed a pair of Kalidor wings hidden within it.

"Your father must be the single proudest man in the Galaxy right now," Tycho said to her as he affixed the wings to the collar of her new uniform coat. "If you were my daughter I'd probably be doing backflips at this moment."

The wings were the mark of a starfighter pilot. Like her father, Syal had chosen to enter into the filled lifestyle of combat piloting. She was a member of the military, and with that the many dangers associated with the calling were squarely placed upon her shoulders. Likewise, she also inherited the many gifts of the profession. Syal knew that every time she sat behind the flightstick, she would be able to protect her loved ones in a way that few were capable of and even fewer would dare consider.

"Welcome to the fraternity, Syal," Tycho said as he snapped a salute.

She returned the gesture. As she held the salute, she spotted a familiar face in the audience. There was her father, smiling from ear to ear as she was welcomed into the military as a new X-Wing pilot.

Syal smiled faintly, "I think I get it, daddy. I know why you had to go."

Fin


End file.
